1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a series surge suppression structure using a clamp voltage and energy storage method to allow remnant voltage and remnant energy of a surge entering a protected facility to be reduced substantially to attain to the complete protection effect. A specific circuit put into practice by the present invention can be applied on a power source input/output terminal and signal input/output terminal. It has a protection effect better than a conventional one on the surge suppression.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, a surge comes from two sources: one is lightning surge yielded from thunder cloud discharge and another is a switching surge yielded from a switching operation of power systems facilities. The surge itself has characteristics of instant high voltage, large current and big energy; the surge voltage may be high up to several 100 kV and the discharge current may also be high up to several 10 kA. Furthermore, because the rising time of a surge waveform is microsecond level and the duration time is 10 microseconds level, the surge has a potential danger to an electronic facility, no matter what it is a induced surge voltage occurred due thunder cloud to thunder cloud discharge or thundercloud to ground discharge, or a switching surge voltage occurred due the operation of power systems facilities itself. The operation of electronic facilities, power facilities or communication facilities will be unstable while being invaded by the surge, or even malfunction (susceptibility interference), and the most serious situation cause terminal elements, electronic facilities, power facilities and communication facilities damaged (vulnerability interference). Therefore, electronic facilities, communication facilities and power facilities are mostly adopted and added with a surge absorber to protect the facilities from damage.
Conventional surge suppression is usually achieved by adopting a gas tube or a metal oxide varistor (MOV) surge suppression element, and a technology it uses almost adopts a parallel mode connection manner. But, in fact, it still cannot have an effective process to discharge current of the surge; the protection effect is not good such that the remnant surge current will still flow into the protected facility to cause a considerable damage. Especially, a several high price facilities frequently cost ten million to one hundred million dollars for each, if there is no good protection added thereon, the damage should be very serious and unable to be estimated once being attacked by the surge.